Mostly Awesome

In this episode, we talk to Seb Hapte-Selassie, co-founder and CTO of telli, a Berlin-based startup building AI agents that run a company's customer-facing operations. Seb studied computer science at Stanford and built product at N26, Pitch and BCG Digital Ventures before starting telli, which went through Y Combinator and recently raised a $15 million seed round led by Redalpine. telli's voice agents already handle millions of conversations for companies like Sky, Enpal and Vaillant.

We start with the person he credits most, his mother, who fled Ethiopia, made it to Europe and went on to Harvard Business School. Seb describes her as the most high agency person he has ever met, someone who simply did not accept that things were impossible, and he still catches himself asking what she would have done in a given situation. He also reflects on what surprised him at Stanford, where professors gave students the benefit of the doubt rather than trying to make them fail, and where he learned that the people building huge companies are not from another universe. A neighbor in his freshman dorm casually mentioned he had just raised half a million dollars from Y Combinator, which was the moment startups stopped feeling abstract.

On finding co-founders, Seb is clear about what actually matters. The idea matters somewhat, the market matters somewhat, complementary skills matter somewhat, but what really counts is whether you enjoy spending enormous amounts of time together, because everything else can change. He and his co-founders Finn zur Mühlen and Philipp Baumanns worked on projects for six months before committing, and used explicit time boxes rather than open-ended deliberation. They agreed to work together until October 2024 and then reevaluate. By that point they had the idea for telli, their first three customers and a place at Y Combinator.

We get into how the product actually works. telli started with energy companies, an insight that came from his co-founders scaling a 150 person phone team at Enpal, and has expanded into pre-qualification, reminder calls and inbound support. Under the hood it is a harder engineering problem than it looks. telli runs seven models in parallel in a single conversation, falls back automatically when a provider degrades, and switches models mid-call for tasks like address collection, where LLMs struggle. Seb also introduces Charlie, their new agent for customer-facing teams, which lives in Slack, Teams, HubSpot and Salesforce rather than inside telli's own app.

On the business side he is unusually direct about limits. telli does not do cold calling and turns down the revenue that would come with it. He tells us about the call where an agent stayed patient with a furious customer long enough to calm them down, and makes the case that agents free call center teams for the work that is actually human. He also explains why he does not think the big model labs will simply absorb the application layer: a model provider does well when you consume more tokens, an application company does well when it finds the cheapest model that solves the problem. We close on telli's principles, including hell yes or no, never blocked, and what he calls calm urgency, plus why he would advise most people not to found straight out of university.

We wrap up with a rapid fire round covering everything from Berlin versus Silicon Valley to LinkedIn flexing and whether AI creates or destroys jobs.

In this episode, we talk to Sarah Fleischer, 3x founder and Co-founder & CEO of tozero, a Munich-based startup that recovers lithium and graphite directly from battery waste. Sarah is a mechanical engineer and CDTM alum who has raised over $20 million and recently launched tozero's industrial demo plant in Germany.

We get into her path to tozero, which includes two earlier ventures that did not survive. At 22 she dropped out of CDTM to sell German baby milk formula to Chinese mothers, a bootstrapped e-commerce business that worked commercially but fell apart over a founder split. Her second company helped Chinese tourists purchase luxury goods across Europe and ultimately had to close. She talks about the three months it took to climb out of that hole, and the realization that both ventures had been driven by money rather than mission, which she now sees as the reason many founders fail.

She also opens up about growing up as a third culture kid, half German and half Chinese, moving between Canada, Hong Kong and Shanghai as her father took computer science professorships around the world. She reflects on watching Shanghai transform in just a few years, what it means to never quite fit into a single culture, and how that shaped her resilience as a founder.

We get into how the technology actually works. Her co-founder Xenia developed a method to extract over 97% of the lithium from spent batteries using organic additives instead of harsh chemicals, functioning somewhat like a coffee filter for critical raw materials. Sarah breaks down why lithium and graphite have remained the unsolved challenge in battery recycling, why almost 99% of refined lithium currently comes from a single country, and what the looming supply deficit from 2030 onwards means for European industry.

On the business side she is refreshingly grounded. She makes the case for why owning and operating your own plants beats licensing, and explains how tozero built an industrial demo plant with just 17 million in total funding. She also talks about why Honda, Intel and Japan's JGC ended up on the cap table, and what strategic investors unlock that pure financial VCs cannot.

We wrap up with a rapid fire round covering everything from deep sea versus deep space to leather jackets and late nights.

In this episode, we talk to Pip Klöckner, tech analyst, angel investor, and host of Doppelgänger, Germany's leading tech podcast. Pip started doing data entry at Idealo, climbed through marketing and product, advised Rocket Internet and KKR, and now invests his own money and breaks down tech for a living.

We get into how he actually never wanted to start a podcast and kept saying no until his co-host found a way to get him to do it anyway. He talks about why podcasting works surprisingly well for introverts, how he processes 115 newsletters without burning out, and what his inbox management has in common with social media.

On AI he's refreshingly pragmatic. He makes a case for why doing nothing might actually be the smart move for most companies right now, and has a pretty blunt take on whether Europe has any realistic shot at competing with US labs spending 50 billion a year.

He also opens up about growing up in East Germany, what selling vegetables with his grandma taught him about economics, and why he thinks there's an integration problem in Germany that nobody really talks about. We ask him what single skill matters most in a world where AI makes intelligence cheap.

We wrap up with a rapid fire round covering everything from dropping out of uni to Munich's reputation.

In this episode, we sit down with Magnus Grünewald, the 23-year-old founder and CEO of Lyceum, who recently raised a massive €10.3M pre-seed round to challenge US hyperscalers. Rather than just a story about a young founder raising capital, this conversation offers a revealing look into what it takes to build "impossible" deep tech from Europe.

Magnus shares how his tenure as Chief of Staff at Enpal served as a crucial lesson in losing the fear of "heavy assets." He candidly admits that starting out required a healthy dose of "delusion" to dare compete with established Tech Giants. He argues that while software is often about rapid iteration, building industrial infrastructure demands a fundamental mindset shift from tweaking buttons to moving mountains.

We explore Lyceum’s core thesis of transitioning from "renting computers" to "consuming compute." Magnus breaks down his "power socket" philosophy, where AI engineers manage server uptime no more than a smartphone user manages the electrical grid. He also outlines why digital sovereignty is far more than a regulatory checkbox, becoming a critical competitive necessity for industries like BioTech.

Finally, Magnus opens up about his leadership style of "extreme delegation" and how he unites PhDs and industry veterans behind a shared mission by hiring for a unique blend of "high urgency" and "conscientiousness." He concludes with a sharp perspective on the AI market, arguing that we should ignore the funding bubble and focus entirely on enterprise adoption.

In this episode, André Petry, co-founder and CEO of Tacto, joins us for a wide-ranging conversation about ambition, agency, and what it means to build from Europe. We trace André’s journey from a 400-person village to CDTM, Berkeley, and eventually to founding one of Germany’s rising industrial software companies. Along the way, he shares how discovering a community of optimistic, self-directed peers at CDTM reshaped his sense of what’s possible and why that shift in mindset ultimately led him to entrepreneurship.

André reflects on his early experiments building websites, online marketing projects as unlikely training grounds for developing self-reliance and problem-solving. He explains why agency, rather than pedigree, is often the defining factor in whether people actually change things, and how this belief guides Tacto’s culture today.

We dive deep into Europe’s industrial backbone and why André believes the continent’s greatest opportunity lies in doubling down on manufacturing, robotics, and industrial AI. He challenges the narrative that ambitious founders must leave for the U.S., arguing instead that the strongest companies are built where domain expertise, customers, and talent are closest. He also opens up about the responsibility he feels toward the system that supported him, how ambition can be cultivated through narrative, and why optimism must shape Europe’s strategy.

In this episode, Julia Gottfriedsen, Head of Data Science & AI at OroraTech, shares how space and artificial intelligence come together to address one of the most pressing challenges of our time. We follow Julia’s journey and explore how technology, leadership, and vision can shape the future. She reflects on how seeing Earth from orbit, with its atmosphere and absence of borders, influences her perspective on responsibility, innovation, and collaboration.

Julia also discusses how OroraTech is building the world’s first thermal-infrared satellite constellation to detect and monitor wildfires in real time, providing critical insights for climate resilience and communities across the globe. She explains how running AI models directly on satellites enhances data quality and why vertical integration is essential for success in space technology. Beyond innovation, Julia emphasizes the importance of leadership, diversity, and inclusion, sharing how she builds high-performing teams in a fast-scaling deep-tech environment, why vulnerability and trust are central to her approach, and how she works to create more opportunities for women in tech and space.

In this special guest episode, Judith Dada (General Partner at La Famiglia) and Hanno Renner (Co-founder & CEO of Personio) join us to reflect on their time at CDTM and how it shaped their journeys over the past decade.

They talk about what made CDTM so formative, how it created a culture of ambition and trust, and why it continues to be a launchpad for some of Europe’s most impactful founders and investors. Judith shares how CDTM influenced her approach to backing early-stage companies, while Hanno reflects on how the program supported the earliest days of building Personio.

This episode is a celebration of community, curiosity, and what happens when driven people are given the space to think big - together.

Erik Muttersbach, co-founder of Forto and now Zauber AI, joins us to talk about what it takes to build globally competitive tech companies from Europe. A CDTM Spring 2013 alumnus, Erik reflects on his journey from being the first employee at DailyDeal, to launching and scaling Forto into one of Europe’s leading digital freight forwarders, and now starting over with Zauber AI.

We dive into why most startups scale too early, how product-market fit is often misunderstood, and why AI agents are finally making it possible to automate the chaotic workflows behind global logistics. Erik shares what he’s doing differently this time around — from hiring and fundraising to focusing relentlessly on building something indispensable.

He also opens up about life after Forto, the decision to return to zero-to-one, and how becoming a parent reshaped his relationship to time, focus, and ambition. If you're building in logistics, AI, or Europe, or just want an honest look at the highs and lows of company-building, this episode is for you.

Verena Pausder joins us to talk about what Germany needs to truly scale innovation. We dive into how the next generation of founders is redefining work, what’s broken in the startup ecosystem, and how AI can bridge the gap in digital education.

She shares lessons from leading the German Startup Association, building companies, and investing in women’s football. This episode is about mindset shifts, modern leadership, and why we need to stop underestimating young builders.

🎧 Topics include:

• The risk-aversion problem in German entrepreneurship

• How AI can transform classrooms and tutoring

• Why Verena is optimistic about the new generation

#Startups #AI #Germany #Education #Leadership #VerenaPausder #Podcast #CDTM

In this episode, we sit down with Gustaf Alströmer, YC Partner and former Head of Growth at Airbnb, to explore how AI is rewriting the playbook for early-stage startups. From why output matters more than effort, to what truly defines exceptional founders today, Gustaf shares lessons from working with hundreds of companies. We also dive into the European startup ecosystem, building ambition at scale, and why immigrant founders consistently outperform. If you’re building in the AI era - or just want to understand what’s changed in startup land over the last two decades.